good afternoon. thank you to everyone who is come to our program today. ..

by filling out a survey, this information assist the staff as they plan future programs so thank you in advance for doing this. following the lecture there will be a book signing outside the door of this room. a service provided by the campus bookstore. in addition to the books, today's event is cosponsored by the national affairs committee of the democrats, also the book would not be possible without such sponsors. the book featured today is the product of 2 two distinguished career journalists. james mccartney, now deceased, and his wife, molly mccartney.

for nearly four decades as a reporter for the chicago daily news, james covered the principal institutions of the federal government with special emphasis on war and conflict which he covered in more than 30 countries. molly worked as a reporter for 30 years including 14 years at the washington post. after her husband's death in 2011 molly continued the research and writing of the book he was working on in his retirement. "america's war machine: vested interests, endless conflicts" is a carefully researched and masterfully written description and analysis of the present day complex, greatly and large it version of what president

eisenhower named with cautionary remarks as the military-industrial complex. america -- "america's war machine: vested interests, endless conflicts" is the most important and timely book, we are very fortunate today to be able to learn from its co-author. please give a warm welcome to molly mccartney. >> thank you very much for that introduction and thank you for coming. i am going to use a slide to illustrate the points i want to make but i want to begin with a description of what i am going to talk about and then go into the details. this book is based on jim

mccartney's experience which included his service in world war ii on the front lines in france and germany. and reporting over 30 years starting in the early 1960s continuing until his death in 2011 and because this book represents his thinking i want to tell you about him and his background, how he went into the newspaper business, his style of reporting and what he learned from his front row seat to history. i will also talk briefly about how to find an agent and first-class publisher at saint martin's press. then we talk about the point of the book which covers the things covered in the introduction, jim wanted this book to be an introduction to the ongoing washington debate about war and peace. he wanted people to know what he

had learned, wanted people to care about this issue as much as he did, wanted people to understand what he had come to understand. how it affects your pocketbook. and why everyone should care about this issue. i will begin with this quotation. the common people don't want war, but they can be given the bidding of their leaders, that is easy, just tell them they are being attacked. and exposing the country to danger. it works the same in any country. they knew something about taking a country to war.

dentist the militarism. does anybody knows who said this, it was not dick cheney. anybody know who said this? it was herman goring, the nazi war criminal who was convicted in nuremberg in 1946. what he describes is what dwight eisenhower, called the military-industrial complex and it is what jim mccartney and i watched expanding the years since then into a war machine that led this country into endless conflicts, think iraq. most recently and ongoing, think of the push for the us to go deeper into syria and the endless conflicts, never-ending wars and covert actions in which the us has been involved since the end of world war ii. how does this happen and how in

the world can anyone suggest the us military is under-sized and underfunded when we outspend the rest of the world, together we spend more than the rest of the world combined on military and national defense. let's start by looking at the vested interest leading to wars and interventions. president eisenhower named two of the elements that are part of this machine. what he said you can see again, this is the great quote, in the councils of government we must guard against influence, soft or unsought by the military-industrial complex, potential for the disastrous rise will persist. two element with eisenhower, the

beltway bandits, defense contractors as they are known. jim mccartney covered that speech. the chicago daily news, making washington explained in detail what eisenhower was talking about. for example, $20 billion tug-of-war, it would be much bigger numbers. there are 5 parts to the series, the pressure is on for profit, and it talks about how lawmakers by for defense funds, the military rivaled the rivalries that are involved, and how

defense pressures come to a 1-way road. there are two sides to this. and study at harvard university and dig deeper into this issue. and is anyone here 18 years old, there are some 18 years, when jim graduated from high school we are in the middle of world war ii. the world was on fire. the first thing that happens if you are 18 years old in 1943 you

are drafted immediately, the innocence of that period, one thing that struck me about it is he is 18 years old, he has been drafted, he doesn't know how to drive a car. i am a texan, i started driving when i was 14 but this was the 1950s. in the 1940s gasoline was rationed, rubber was rations. if your family had a car you do not turn it to your teenage son to go driving. his parents drove him to the railroad station. note that his older brother was in the army, had been drafted, that was in europe. after basic training jim gets on

a troopship, with 5000 other groups, one ship out of new york harbor across the atlantic and you end up in southern france, this was four or five month after d-day so he was not part of the normandy invasion where so many people died. he was part of a third wave so in southern france they get into trucks and are trucked north about 400 miles into the mountains. this is november and they are wearing their summer uniforms because the military has not been able to catch up with them and give them winter clothes so he gets out of the truck that brought him into this area where you can hear the guns going off but they are on the front lines and he looks around and sees a mountain trail with some g.i.s

carrying stretchers. it is clear what happens, the stretchers have a g.i. who stepped on a shoe bomb, which is the ied of the day. it is the size of a cigar box with a little tnt in it and the lid was propped up and buried just under the ground so you step on it, it blows up your foot and the germans were good at this. the germans knew that if you could take one man out of action, blow his foot off it takes three or four guys, you are taking several people out of the fighting troops with this kind of strategy. jim got through, never stepped on a shoe bomb but he is under fire every day living in a foxhole. trying to stay alive, pushing

germans back into germany. they all thought they were going to die, he thought he was going to die. in late march 1945 this was only a few months before the war end did theed, he was hit by shrapnel in germany walking down a road and heard the german 88. if you don't know what a german 88 is, i found a picture. you can see the picture on the left, the time he was in the military and after four years, and he weighed 10020 pounds because you don't get a lot to eat when you are on the front lines. the way these guns work is they shoot the shells over the enemy on the other side. and when the shell got close to

those guys it would explode because it hit something or it exploded and there is shrapnel, if you heard the 88s coming, and on this particular day they were walking down a road where there was no coverage, it is a ditch but shrapnel hit them anyway so he got hit and was airlifted to a hospital but recovered. no permanent injuries. he gets involved in college newspaper, falls in love with journalism, and after graduating from michigan state and rolled in a masters program at northwestern, ran out of money when the g.i. money was used up, this is middle america in the late 40s and 50s, not a lot of

student loans. his father offered to loan him, not give him, loan him the money to finish. he took the money, finished and paid his debt back, $5 a week or something like that. he ends a reporter for the chicago daily news and in 1960 he gets sent to washington and that is how he came to cover eisenhower's 1961 speech. he liked to tell people how he heard the speech, he heard eisenhower make a speech. nobody was in the oval office with president eisenhower. you need an advanced text and watch it on tv and cover the story. but in listening to this eisenhower also talked about the economy, the red scare and the military-industrial complex. jim's reaction was what is this guy talking about?

what is the military-industrial complex? how does it work? why is a dangerous? why should i care? those were the questions in his mind but as a reporter in washington, he was in no position to get answers and that led to the series of stories i told you earlier. in 1968, moved from chicago daily news to mcclatchy, a huge chain and became the national security reporter for these papers included the miami herald, san jose, every paper you can imagine out of washington. and they had no bureaus at that point. he was in and out of the soviet union on a regular basis, saudi arabia in the middle east.

there were no cell phones. had a small portable typewriter he carried around with him along with a bottle of whiskey, and operators to make sure your story got back to washington. so briefly, we will get to the book in a minute but just to show you, these are a few press credentials, the last one another reykjavík sabic -- summit between reagan and gorbachev but these are the stories from the 1965 intervention in the dominican republic where johnson sent in troops and you can see the theme of these stories, telling this with a straight face, then the vietnam story, reykjavík, this

is a column he wrote in 2005, does america love peace as much as we think. the book which reflects all the things i described is also based on my own experience as a journalist or five newspapers including the washington post. my specialty for many years was pocketbook issues. very good experience if you write about defense spending because this is the biggest pocketbook expense. i was able to combine what jim knew about the military-industrial complex with what i know about dealing with big institutions including big oil and studied a lot about the middle east at georgetown university, i was a lehman fellow and did a lot of traveling as well so the result

is the book. what the book does is document the expansion of the military-industrial complex to include additional elements. we have five altogether. you have the military, defense contractors, congress, the intelligence community and the think tank cox, these elements, there are probably others but these were the five big ones he saw emerge and he wrote about and documented and are a big part of this book. let's go individually to each of these, starting with congress which supports billions of dollars in military and security

spending and campaign contributions. so a good example with what happens with congress is the story of the c-17 cargo jet. there are two parts to this story. in 1990, when dick cheney who later became vice president, in 1990 he was secretary of defense under president george hw bush and cheney as the guy who was over the pentagon in defense operations wanted to purchase 120 of the c-17 jets. once they were built the program was supposed to stop because that was all the military needed. congress disagreed. they voted to provide more c-17s than the pentagon wanted. they voted to buy 151 and later, 108. i put these numbers up here because it is hard to follow. that is 1990, 20 years later the defense secretary is robert

gates, in april 2009 gaetz goes to congress and says 205 c-17s, that is enough, we don't want anymore. congress voted to fund 223 and this is the cost of $250 million each. >> 17 to 19? >> sorry. >> i thought maybe -- >> a typo, sorry, ignore that. i have shown this slide repeatedly. sorry for the confusion. the question is why did congress do this? why did they give the military

more airplanes and ships than the military? because the c-17 program is a welfare program. 650 suppliers, 30,000 jobs in 44 states. offers jobs for companies, jobs for workers, political support for lawmakers. it is a vote for defense, anyone who fails to vote for these programs and support the defense establishment, weak on defense. is going to hear about it in the next election. i am a big fan of superman so i

loved the bloomberg business news story about the b-17 because this was their headline. this is only one example. more ships than the navy once, more tanks for the army, you may remember, a fairly recent story about the -- the headline tells you a great deal about it. this is the way cnn played the story. thanks but no tanks. congress voted to continue making the tanks. the little town where these parts were being made, there

goes the economy, it will ruin us. other members of congress vote with you through the town, you will vote for him when they were subject to the question. there is a scratch my back, i will scratch yours at work here. i would mention star wars which was ronald reagan's idea, that program proposed in the mid-1980s never worked the way it was supposed to. it is funded by every president who has come along since reagan and is still being funded even though it hasn't worked, it is hard to kill it once it is in the bureaucracy. some people would say spending on defense, getting this job, what is wrong with that, the

problem is the research shows you get more jobs with non-defense spending then you get with defense spending and we know this because university of massachusetts did a study and they found if you take $1 billion in federal money you get 11,200 military jobs with it and if you spend it on clean energy jobs you get more. if you spend it on healthcare jobs you get more. spent on education jobs you get more and the bottom line of that study was this quote, spending on the military is a relatively poor source of job creation. okay, let's talk about the intelligence community.

this is another major element in the complex of forces that can lead to war, talking about the use of flawed, twisted intelligence. as it is put here. we know in the run-up to the iraq war that president george bush wanted to remove saddam hussein through military action. we know the case for this invasion was the idea saddam hussein had weapons of mass destruction. and that was based on, quote, intelligence that was then twisted to justify the invasion. one of the reasons we know that is what happened, there are several reasons but one is it was a secret note released by british intelligence after one of their meetings with officials of the bush administration.

this is the note that said the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. in other words we have to show the public why we are doing this, so we will make intelligence be the basis for our actions. if you think about it, it shouldn't come has a surprise that the intelligence community taylor's information. if you work for somebody, give the boss what he wants or you won't have a job very long. i was at a dinner party where i made this point knowing there is a cia guy at dinner and wondering how he would respond or react, you are right, you give the boss what he wants or will be reassigned or sent off. i will talk about twisted

intelligence. consequences for people who go against the establishment on issues like this, this is a great story, this is about beautiful blonde spy, you may remember the story. it started with president bush telling the nation in his state of the union message in january 2003 right before we went into iraq that the british had learned saddam hussein had recently bought significant quantities of uranium from africa. and ambassador by the name of joseph wilson who happened to be married to the spy who wrote an op-ed in the new york times challenging what bush had said.

wilson had been sent specifically to africa to see if there is any truth to this and the truth is wasn't there. one week after this column appeared the new york times columnist by the name of robert novak published an article about wilson's wife valerie and the fact that she worked for the cia, he outed her, ruined her job and all of her contact people subject to all sorts of things. don't know if anybody died as a result of this but fear that it would. there is a much longer story to this, scooter libby who worked for vice president cheney eventually was convicted because he lied about the cover-up, he served time in prison. this twisted intelligence plays into the way in which sometimes we take actions based on information that is totally wrong and i will summarize some

of this. it turned out to be false. there was a failure to perceive the erection of the berlin wall in 1961 and failure to precede its fall in 1939. some of you -- everybody was so surprised. the collapse of the soviet union in 1991. and failure to perceive terrorist attacks in 2001. we will talk about the think tanks. when president eisenhower made that speech in 1961 there were very few think tanks, a few but not very many. but they turned out policy

papers. there are more than 1800 think tanks in the us and 400 of them in and around washington. i guy by the name of jonathan alter, now, very recently just in the last few weeks the new york times did a huge spread where they operate. ideally you would think it is a think tank, independence, giving us a nonpartisan point of view, but what the new york times reported and what the book shows is the think tanks actually are often pushing the agenda of people who fund them and their studies. specifically the new york times piece had some defense contractors as examples of what happened. elizabeth warren was outraged by this. there were stories about her

reaction to this, senator elizabeth warren. in her view, what they were doing by pondering their position through the think tank, thinly disguised form of lobbying. and dangerous. there is a good youtube piece about her talking about this. with the exception of the cato institute who typically oppose any intervention the conservative think tanks are very aggressive on intervention and the ways in which the -- america uses its military to manage the world. the group that provided the rationale for the invasion of iraq was called the project

renew american century, small arm of the american enterprise institute which is the largest and one of the best-known conservative think tanks. the iraq invasion was in 2003 but as early as 1998 the people at cnet were writing letters, one went to president clinton calling for the removal of saddam hussein. who signed that letter in 1998 saying let's get rid of saddam hussein? donald rumsfeld, paul wolfowitz, richard pearl, and others who favored a new extent of american influence around the world. president clinton as you figured out ignored the letter. on september 20, 2001, this is tween 9 days after the 9/11 attacks, he writes to president bush who is now in the white house, repeating a call for

regime change in iraq. this time the people who signed the 1998 letter were actually in the government. rumsfeld was secretary of defense, wolfowitz was deputy and pearl within a defense advisory role. dick cheney, who was a supporter of the program, was now vice president. what happens? we invade iraq. it was not a cakewalk as many in the conservative community said it would be. instead we upset the balance in the region, no weapons of mass destruction were found, no one greeted us as liberators, thousands died, the cost is now into billions, some have estimated trillions of dollars, a disaster. not a pretty picture. in fact, if you accept the idea that america is a peaceloving nation as many people do, this

is a very disturbing view of the world but it is also an example of how the washington-based system works. we have now seen a presidential campaign in which candidates call president obama week on defense and urge the us take a more aggressive, tougher stand and roll in the middle east. they have called, quote, rebuild our military, which is simply not true, not necessary, they want to send more troops to battle isis. you may remember ted cruz wanted to carpet bomb the middle east, tear up the iran agreement, chris christie wanted to establish a no-fly zone and shoot down any russian plane that came into that area and rand paul, an interventionist, libertarian said to chris christie, welcome to world war iii if you do that.

has for donald trump we can't be sure what he will do. he has been on both sides of all of this but we have think tanks pumping out these papers and in essence we have a war machine and it drives not just the overt things that are done but also covert. i want to give as an example of that our involvement in iran. not many people were born in 1953 so a bit of history. you recall 1953, when a cia coup helped depose the democratically elected prime minister of iran after nationalizing a british oil company. with the prime minister gone, we helped install a puppet, the shah, who provided some ardor in the country and assured a smooth

flow of oil while repressing his own people and committing many human rights violations. many of the people who overthrew the shah in 1979 were people who blamed us for having supported him all those years. they took our diplomats hostage, took to the streets screaming death to america. there were other reasons, this played into what happened. why are we surprised they hate us. think about it. talk about vietnam. in 1964, one of our routine patrol boats had been attacked for the second time in international waters by the north vietnamese. it won a resolution from congress allowing him to expand the war in vietnam. there was never a second attack.

it was not a routine patrol boat. it was an american spy ship equipped with listening devices to pick up communications they thought they could hear if they got close enough to those north vietnamese command centers we even robert mcnamara, secretary of defense, said there was no second attack. but the fact it was presented as a second attack, that approval from congress for johnson to expand the war in which thousands more people died. you may remember president obama was recently in laos talking about all the unexploded american ordinances dropped during the vietnam war. we were not at war with laos, but there seemed to be a north

vietnamese trail that ran through laos which sending in bombers they were so horrendous, tons of bombs we dropped on a country none of which ever exploded and they are still killing people in the fields, and obama said we would give them more to locate those, and we have most recently the invasion of iraq. saddam hussein has weapons of mass destruction but he didn't. and today, iraq is a mess. it has opened the door for the isis extremists to pose a new threat. the new york times recently had a column, opinion column by a middle east expert who said iraq

is the mother of isis and saudi arabia is the father. let me talk about that a little bit. we shudder when we see isis beheading people on tv and the internet. it is terrible. but guess what, saudi arabia routinely beheaded people. and did not support the saudi marketing. osama bin laden who had been offended by the presence of american troops in that 1990 gulf war, you will pay for this, you put your troops on sacred ground, 15 of those 19 hijackers

on 9/11, the religion is so conservative women can't drive much less outside the home. i want to put some numbers up here. and one weapon in particular, why do we keep spending billions of dollars to build weapons systems that do not work the way they are supposed to. such as be 22. this is what time magazine said. it is unsafe, cost 30 lives headed to iraq, long said tale of them be 22 osprey. i mentioned in a talk not long ago, one of the military guys came to me and said they fixed

those problems, it is working fine now. not sure that is right but i will appreciate you telling me and it still cannot be used the way it is supposed to be used because when they try -- they do not know -- and the father of one of the two marines in the osprey crash in 2015 he is going to sue boeing, i hope you will laugh at my next example, does the us government really employ more musicians in its military band than it has diplomats?

somebody laughed. yes. this is something walter pincus walked about in the washington post and robert gates talked about in his speeches. how much money are we spending? we spent more than we did during the cold war, more than we spent in vietnam, more than all our enemies combined, you can see this is based on the reports, the numbers are not the same. other countries spending a little more. the last, the defense budget is three times what china is spending, it is a little less. david, who works at the wall street journal, doing some other

things, he said the us defense budget is greater than the combined defense budget for the next 17 largest spenders and he named them. i would note, when you think about federal discretionary spending, this is after medicare, social security and other things they spend money on, something called discretion all spending, 50% of that is for defense. the pentagon and national defense, getting into $1 trillion a year. this is based on research, one of the experts. another way to look at defense

spending since the 9/11 attacks, do you turn your mind back? the soviet union collapsed in 1991, a lot of people thought we would get a peace dividend and we won't spend so much on defense, there was a slight decline in the years after the 1990s. clearly we were not going up anymore. then we get to 9/11, 2001 and it goes short. they couldn't throw enough money at the military. i talked to one woman, wasn't anybody objecting to this? if you suggested cutting or spending less then the military would be considered treason. anyone who has those ideas didn't talk about it publicly. it was seen as unpatriotic and not something you do. i think i have another slide here which shows the increase over the years. it is up from the red.

one of the problems is the imbalance in what we are doing with our resources. all our eggs, money and defense pentagon military side and very little into the diplomatic side. this imbalance is something that has been of concern to the people at the head of the military in a speech that admiral mike mullen, the former chairman, us foreign policy dominated a military too pen -- dependent on generals and admirals who lead overseas. you have to ask is it a coincidence that the tween 911

terrorists crashed one of their airplanes into the pentagon while ignoring the state department? or was it that they understood the sources of influence that drives the american government? think about it like this. when world war ii ended did the soldiers came home. then we got the korean war and the cold war and since then we maintain a large standing army and huge intelligence bureaucracy involved in endless conflicts around the world. we have been involved in something almost all the time. it has been resulting in the deaths of millions of people and cost billions of dollars. iraq and afghanistan, what we did in pakistan, is roughly $6 trillion, the people who were

injured come home and we are involved in medical care, it keeps going up. the other piece of this is our effort to maintain the flow of oil, and those pathways remain open. in 1980, there is a mini crisis in which president carter, democrat threatened to use nuclear force if necessary to keep the oil flowing. what we have been doing in the middle east and continue to do in the middle east. you have that going on. people tired of these wars, tired -- now that we are less

dependent on oil. the sources keep pushing. i have one more piece and want to take questions. jim mccarty was good at asking questions to illuminate, he would say why does the media go along with these endless conflicts? why does the media support threat inflation and demonizing of enemies who may be very bad guys that don't represent the threat, i want to wrap this up with a few words about the media and the complicit role it sometimes plays. three cases in the book, one of them about iraq where the cheerleading for war, on the washington post, in the new york

times was deafening, for example the day after colin powell made his speech, making the case that saddam hussein, take him down, the washington post op-ed had a series of articles, a well-known liberal, and opposed to something like this as you listen to colin powell, i am persuaded. jim hoagland, more of a middle-of-the-road guy found in colin powell's comments he found an old trooper in reference to colin powell, the smoking gun in the content of that speech, george will will agree with it, richard cohen and other liberals who agree with colin powell.

it was clear in the coverage not just on the opinion page or news that everyone was on board. the new york times, some of those stories was the post never apologized, the managing editor, and we overplay those stories. i am a creature of the media. the free press is an essential part of free society. the media failed to do the job and plenty of examples where the media did great work, you would know about bob woodward and coral bernstein reporting the

watergate breakout to president nixon's downfall. more recently the boston globe and the stories it did on priest abuse which as you know not only got lots of pulitzers for their work but was in a movie called spotlight. it is a great example of what the media did right. the guy who was editor of the boston globe and responsible for those stories with a guy named marty baron, executive editor of the washington post. we are lucky to have him. so think of those ways in which the media did a good job and the way in which jim mccartney did a good job trying to illuminate these issues and think about them. when we were living in florida, he became a popular speaker, the library and various groups would

like to hear how does washington work, and very good at talking about these issues. when bush invaded iraq in 2003, focused more and more on the war and peace angle and when he finished making these talks, people would say i had no idea, please write a book explaining this. i didn't understand the connections that you made. this is what he was working on when he died in 2011. at the memorial service a few weeks later one of the women who had known him and was active in getting him out to see, what will happen to jim's book. i really don't know, you need to finish that book, it needs to be out there. it took a little while to get

through the material. and get whatever else i needed, it helped that i have been listening to this for 30 years. a graduate course in national security, ride home on the dinner table. it helped as a reporter, i am accustomed to researching and writing and knowing a good story when i see one. this is a good story but i have to tell you i am a skeptic. one thing they tell you in the newsroom is i don't care if you're mother told you, you better check it out. i checked out everything he said and made sure we were exactly right. as herman goring said the common people don't want war. that is understood. this works in the same way. i will briefly summarize my point and ask some questions.

i do this in the form of take aways. let me go through these quickly. we keep going to war without regard to the cost of war. according to the website costofwar.com, the cost is $6 billion. despite those early claims that iraq oil would cover this. many people still believe the us should be and operate as the world policeman and to impose democracy everywhere even where there is no tradition or belief in democracy and have no institutions to make democracy possible, and even though we fail to make that happen in iraq or even in libya. i would note, who are our enemies today? the military people will tell

you they are most worried about russia and china, rising china and belligerent russia. and terrorists are the problem. and terrorists win when we overreact. i argue we have been overreacting since 9/11. for example, i heard somebody make the comparison that you are more likely to die from a fall in a bathtub rather than a terrorist attack. the perspective is important. the pentagon budget is 10 times more than the state department. we put our money into the military, we keep trying to use it to solve political problems. when there is no military solution to many of these political problems, that is what

we have been hung up on with syria. the military can take everybody out but what happens then? are you going to stay there forever and run the government and be a target of what they don't like about us? this is what the fight is about. there is a huge disconnect between the military and civilian population. we don't have skin in the game as we did in world war ii where everybody was involved in the war effort. now we have a volunteer army and it goes off and does things we don't pay a lot of attention to and makes headlines. the middle east, we went there because of the oil, stayed there because of the oil and stay there because of the oil even though we are less dependent on middle east oil today. eventually this could change the power structure in the middle east and also our involvement. we are in a transition period of what is going to happen.

i say this for trump. we are paying for this. we are making sure the oil is open and available for friend in japan and europe. they are spending their money on health and education and other things, we are picking up the bill for their defense. that is an ongoing issue. president obama talked about free riders because that is what happened, we are sending our guys and our money to make sure they get oil and it is all part of this effort, we should manage the world and do it by doing this. if you have not read books by andrew base of which i would recommend them. he's almost a poet when it comes to writing about these issues. he is a retired marine colonel, has done wonderful work so i am going to close by reading you some notes from a presentation i heard him make not long ago,

quote -- these are paraphrases -- we are on the pilot like the war on drugs, the war in the middle east is part of our lives, there is bipartisan approval of these wars with politicians declaring support for the troops rather than questioning the policies. the promise of war, jobs, campaign contributions all help perpetuate the war. in addition, there is a need for self-preservation among the foreign-policy people, we do have an interest in middle east stability but more bombs will not create stability. to think the military can shape even ands in the middle east is absurd. we have been on a binge to punish the wicked, reward the faithful and sustain the idea that we are exceptional.

perpetuating wars in the middle east is not advance america and one day america will awaken to this end the wars will end. right now, america is slumbering. question? while you are thinking, a friend of mine says that sounds interesting but is there any sex in your book? ..

role for the f35 for the reason that you can use the unmanned drones. these are planes that operate off of the ships and he said they can't fight long distances so you have to get your ship right up there to the enemy in order for them to

fly over and do any damage. and again the question is why are you doing that when you can have these unmanned drones. they are continuing problems with the f35. to make anybody else, question. why do they push the iraq war. >> the new york times apologized for the overplay they get this. the big media was on board there were reporters writing stories questioning the presence of mass destruction. but they weren't putting the story on the front page they did not believe the stories.

a better example is what happened with knight ridder. they had two reporters jonathan attlee and walter strobel who are working for knight ridder. if you're knight ridder in washington you don't get the same kind of help from the experts and that you are if you're the washington post and new york times. what you do as a reporter is you don't try to get to the top guys anymore go to the middle people who are really doing all the work. and those are the people who are telling jonathan and walter we don't see this evidence of mass destruction. we just don't agree. the philadelphia bureau did

not run their own stories because it didn't match the new york times story. they believed the new york times instead of their own people because it's like if you don't believe it you must be unpatriotic. and there is a herd mentality within the media that doesn't take effect in cases like this where if everybody is reporting and must be right. if you report something else it's wrong. how do you prove it. that's one of the problems within the media we all know it's there and iraq was probably one of the worst examples. bill moyers did a whole program on the failure of the media and the iraq war. they been on npr and talked about this as well. when you're running up against the government and their sane this and who are you to say

the government is wrong so that's the problem. and there's also the problem that if those at new new york times guys didn't write what their sources were telling them they could lose those sources. there is a relationship there that is also part of the problem. >> is anybody else. he's got one more question. >> i didn't want to preempt anyone else who had it asked yet. if you want to dig a more into the issue of multiple source intelligence because that's how it was really done the officer in the assessment was doing at the thinking and planning for iraq they reported that. the officer in that assessment have a couple of analysts who took around to half a dozen

other national intelligence agency all the sudden were getting senate were getting half a dozen different agencies that we cooperate with telling us the same story and were thinking that this is a multiple source intelligence. it wasn't. and the security advisor did not do her job inventing in vetting where did this come from and how do you know. you get is very complex bureaucracies competing with each other maybe they want to hang onto their information so they don't share with a guy over there because he he's really not on our team so as a result you get mixed results and not very good decision-making at the top. it turns out the fbi knew some of those hijackers were here but they didn't tell somebody else and so it got lost in the

maze these are complex problems. there's a great but there's not back -- black and white. thank you very much i hope this was useful. >> i think they have to be at another classroom at 130. let me thank you. you're doing a great service of the american public i hope you can speak at many venues. i hope it reaches a very wide audience. it's the most important thing. and thank you for all your hard work. [applause]. i will correct that slide. i'm glad you told me that.

book tv tapes hundreds of here is a look at some of the events we are covering this week. they will provide a history of the gun manufacture winchester repeating arms company and share the connection. a panel of presidential biographers they will discuss at the the suspected biographies of clinton, carter and reagan. at the new york university law school in manhattan. and then on wednesday were back in new york. michael strauss and jay richard got shared their thoughts about the universe. also that evening in new york the national book award as an event hosted by the museum of the american gangster.

at the san francisco jazz center in san francisco at the annual american book awards. they recognize outstanding literary achievement for the entire spectrum of america's diverse community. that's a look at some of the author programs were covering this week. many of these events are open to the public. look for them to air in the near future on book tv on c-span two. >> in life equity about being out and campaigning now i was campaigning for congress was the first woman elected in her own right. we had had four women who have followed a spouse. i was in a county had a little

café we call them neat and threes. we have gone and in this county. they didn't have many women that served so i was passing out my campaign material and i went over to this gentleman you could tell have been out farming and i said hi and the state senator marsha blackburn i'm running for congress and i sure would appreciate having your boat. he said what qualifies you? for the u.s. house of representatives and i thought while you know i've been to

the girl scout cookie mom so i think i probably could handle the u.s. house of representatives because i've handled jobs. he did didn't want to talk about the state senator to keep us state income tax relief. i thought you know those jobs had been there in the girl scout cookie mom. those are true life skills that do prepare you for working with people in working with diverse groups of people. and with being able to have that with the groups and entities and organizations part of that transferable's skills. people will understand a woman when it comes to the job that

she can do. >> was the impressive? >> he called me back over to the table. i think congressman suits me just find. -- fine. and i hope i got his foot. you can watch this and other programs online book tv.org. here watching book tv on c-span two with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend book tv television for serious readers. and they are live this weekend from madison with the wisconsin book festival. there is a full day of author coverage for you including a national book award finalist

for the complete schedule of the wisconsin book festival go to our website book tv.org. also this weekend on the afterwards program we discussed the life in the u.s. as an end i committed immigrant. her book is called my underground american dream she is interviewed by dorian my sinner. also this weekend a look at the intellectual life of seventh service court of appeals in the former health and human services discusses how presidents have dealt with disasters. they discuss of the constitution and how it relates to today's political and social issues and there is an author panel discussion unchallenged in band books. >> that's just a few of the programs that you will see on book tv this weekend. for complete schedule book tv.org. it's 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors television